How to Successfully Change

I have just listened to a fantastic TedTalk titled ‘Forget the big change, start with a tiny habit’ given by B.J. Fogg.  The talk was sent to me by my good friend and Business Coach, Leah Aharoni.  The 17 minute lecture talks about how we can motivate ourselves to make changes in our lives. Do we throw ourselves in the deep end and expect to make humongous changes to the way we do something, like our eating habits or exercising, but only to find ourselves three to four months down the road reverting back to our old habits? Even when we know that the change is to our benefit, we still find it difficult to stick to the new routine.  So why is it so difficult for us to change and stick to our decision?

Yom Kippur is here and with it we do some soul searching, we review our performance for the previous year and what we want to improve this year. Yet, if we really look very closely at our performance during the last years, we really haven’t made any major changes the way we live our lives. We tend to say we want to…………… and then find out that we really haven’t done anything that we intended to do.

I have done extensive research into the psychology of money and why people allow themselves to incur debt and why they are not doing anything about relieving themselves from the burden and stress the debt brings and start to live within in their means.  The conclusion is that most of the time, people are not aware of how bad the situation really is and they are not quite sure about how to rectify the situation.

So this brings me to the lecture mentioned at the beginning of this article.  To make your goal for the coming year to be debt free you need to ask yourselves whether this is credible? Or to make a more realistic goal for the new year that you will pay cash when you go to the supermarket and leave your credit card at home.  Start with baby steps and modify the way you spend your money with tiny changes.  So you will see that by the end of the year a big difference in the way you spend money and of course to your bank account.

Gmar Hatimah Tova

Suzy Kahati

Family Financial Advisor

http://suzykahati.com/